2009 July

President Obama announced yesterday the American Graduation Initiative, a twelve billion dollar plan to reform U.S. community colleges. The initiative calls for five million additional community college graduates by 2020, and plans that “increase the effectiveness and impact of community colleges, raise graduation rates, modernize facilities, and create new online learning opportunities” to aid this goal.

A significant component of the initiative is the plan to “create a new online skills laboratory.” From the fact sheet,

“Online educational software has the potential to help students learn more in less time than they would with traditional classroom instruction alone. Interactive software can tailor instruction to individual students like human tutors do, while simulations and multimedia software offer experiential learning. Online instruction can also be a powerful tool for extending learning opportunities to rural areas or working adults who need to fit their coursework around families and jobs. New open online courses will create new routes for students to gain knowledge, skills and credentials. They will be developed by teams of experts in content knowledge, pedagogy, and technology and made available for modification, adaptation and sharing. The Departments of Defense, Education, and Labor will work together to make the courses freely available through one or more community colleges and the Defense Department’s distributed learning network, explore ways to award academic credit based upon achievement rather than class hours, and rigorously evaluate the results.”

It is important to note here the difference between “open” and simply accessible “online”. Truly open resources for education are clearly designated as such with a standard license that allows not only access, but the freedoms to share, adapt, remix, or redistribute those resources. The educational materials that make up the new open online courses for this initiative should be open in this manner, especially since they will result from a government plan. We are excited about this initiative and hope the license for its educational materials will allow all of these freedoms. Catherine Casserly, formerly in charge of open educational resources at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (now at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), writes,

“Today at Macomb College, President Barack Obama announced a proposal to commit $50 million for the development of open online courses for community colleges as part of the American Graduation Initiative: Stronger American Skills through Community Colleges. As proposed, the courses will be freely available for use as is and for adaption as appropriate for targeted student populations. The materials will carry a Creative Commons license.”

You can read the official announcement at the White House site on their blog and visit the briefing room for the full fact sheet.

Museums, archives, and cultural institutions have been forced to re-examine their relationship with the digital presentation of public domain works in their collections. This has brought the issue of “copyfraud” to the forefront. Recently, the UK’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) threatened legal action under UK law against a Wikipedia user for, among other things, copyright infringement of digital photos of public domain works by uploading them to Wikipedia.

This raises some interesting legal issues related to copyright, jurisdiction, and enforcement. In the U.S., the Bridgeman v. Corel decision would probably bar NPG’s claims. Similarly, the U.S. Supreme Court in Feist held that copyright protection is not based on a “sweat of the brow” theory. UK courts have not necessarily agreed. However, there is the strictly legal, and then there is the practical. In the 2005 article Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility, Kenneth Hamma, former Exec. Dir. for Digital Policy, J. Paul Getty Trust, highlights the collision of traditional approaches to control over museum collections and the digitization of the public domain:

[R]esistance to free and unfettered access may well result from a seemingly well-grounded concern: many museums assume that an important part of their core business is the acquisition and management of rights in art works to maximum return on investment. That might be true in the case of the recording industry, but it should not be true for nonprofit institutions holding public domain art works; it is not even their secondary business. Indeed, restricting access seems all the more inappropriate when measured against a museum’s mission – a responsibility to provide public access.

Restricting access via copyfraud or DRM defeats the purpose of the public domain, and damages the reputation and mission of the institution holding the original copies of these works. However, the NPG’s disappointing actions should not overshadow the many institutions working to make the public domain accessible to you, the public. The Commons on Flickr is a great example of 27 private and public institutions from all over the world who are making works available with “no known copyright restrictions”. Working with, not against, cultural institutions highlights some of the ways cultural heritage institutions and communities can work together to mutual benefit.

We hope that institutions will increasingly see the the mission value (and financial value — attracting visitors to see original works) of working with communities to open up access to curated public domain works and of proactively marking public domain works as such for humans and computers, e.g., with our public domain tools.

Caught an interesting NY Times post over the weekend about Riversimple, a British start-up that recently debuted a prototype of a two-seat hydrogen fuel cell car. There are several interesting things about Riversimple’s proposed business model – for instance, it plans to lease the car instead of sell it, and wants to employ a manufacturing process in which the cars are built in a variety of small, local factories. The detail that is of particular interest to us here at Creative Commons, though, is that the company has published the car’s design schematics under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial license on the site of the 40 Fires Foundation, a project that invites community participation in the car design process.

Says Riversimple CEO Hugo Spowers:

“If we give away the tools for entrepreneurs around the world to make money from making cars, we expect to harness an unstoppable groundswell of support globally.” … “From a strictly commercial point of view, we want to encourage others to copy us as we want these standards adopted ubiquitously.”

Our license chooser automatically generates the proper ccREL code, so its easy! Don’t forget to fill out the “Additional Information” section. You’ll then get a snippet of XHTML embed that will contain ccREL. Place this near your work (preferably on its same page of the work which also happens to be unique) and you’re all set. If you’re running an entire content community, you can also dynamically generate this markup based on the particular user, title of the work and so on. Check out Thingiverse for a excellent example of this functionality.

Are you already using ccREL or RDFa on your website or platform? Let us know or add it to our Wiki page!

To filter by CC search, go to Google’s advanced Image Search page and select the options you’d like in the “Usage rights” section. Your results will be restricted to images marked with CC licenses or other compatibly licensed photos.

Remember, Google can only provide search results that its algorithms find tagged with the license you specify; it is your obligation to verify the license of the image you’re using and make sure you’re conforming to its guidelines.

This is a huge step forward for the future of image search on the web, so congratulations to the Google team on another great CC implementation!

CC Vietnam has released its first license draft (pdf) and is inviting the Vietnamese and international community to join in reviewing it. The goal of the license porting, coordinated by Creative Commons International, is to legally and linguistically adapt the CC licensing suite to national law. That way, creators enjoy additional legal certainty while better understanding the license terms in their own language.

An English retranslation (pdf) of the Vietnamese license is available, including an explanation of its substantive legal changes. The team has also provided supplemental documents about the jurisdiction’s civil code and corresponding copyright law.

CC Vietnam hosted at the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) and led by Dr. Lynne McNamara, Dr. Phuong Nguyen, and Mr. Tu Ngo, and initiated by Mr. Hung V. Tran. The Vietnamese license porting is supported by Ms. Thuy Dang and Ms. Hang Dang of the renown law firm D&N International.

National CC projects rely on content creators and license users worldwide to give feedback to improve local legal tools and build a strong community. Please consider weighing in on CC Vietnam’s drafting efforts by subscribing to their mailing list.

The album, which is a collaboration between Vosotros and Sam Barsh, is generatingsomeamazingbuzz and digital sales. Most exciting for those in the CC-community is the following quote from Amazon-blog Chordstrike (the album peaked at #8 on Amazon’s Classic R&B download chart):

Assembled by a crew of some premier sidemen, this fluid set of thumping soul is the sort of album that as fun to listen to as it seems like it was to make. With one eye pointed towards the past and the other one winking, they show love for not only the funky greats of the past 30 years, but affection for kitsch, too. Vosotros takes their motto, “music for you-all,” seriously. They’ve made the album available as a free download for a limited time and licensed it under Creative Commons encourage sharing. Enjoy it, remix it, and tell your friends.

Last December, when ccLearn issued its report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Creative Commons Netherlands published its own entitled, “Reuse of material in the context of education and research.” However, the report was only available in Dutch until recently. Now, thanks to Paul Keller (Creative Commons Nederland) and Wilma Mossink (SURF), the English version of the report is online. It recommends the most open Creative Commons license, Attribution Only, for reuse of material in the context of education and research. From the original announcement,

“The rise of the Internet and other new ICT tools have led to drastic changes in the options for distribution and reuse. These changes demand a reorientation in the rules for sharing educational and research materials.

Since sharing educational and research materials is high on the agenda of Dutch higher education and research institutions, SURFdirect and Creative Commons examined the different Open Content licences that are available and that will make clear to reusers what they are permitted to do with material held in repositories.

SURFdirect has indicated that the choice of licence must not create barriers to the future use of educational and research material, that it can be applied at both research universities and universities of applied sciences [hogescholen], and that this can in fact be done in 80% of cases, this report recommends using the most liberal Creative Commons licence for textual output…

Another important recommendation in this report is that SURF should set up an effective awareness-raising campaign in order to introduce and explain Creative Commons licences to those ‘in the field’.”